All modern businesses are faced with the difficult challenge of capacity, puzzling out how to accomplish much more with much less. We’ve been hard at work inventing a broad portfolio of Data, Metrics, and Tools sustainability professionals can use to help their companies and clients Do More Today. Come on in for a tour of our workshop.

This February, two additions to the costituzione made environmental husbandry a pillar of Italy’s values as a nation. Article 9 now includes “protection of the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, even in the interest of future generations,” as a fundamental principle.

Using hyperbole when describing latter-day climate events creates the illusion that such events are still, as they used to be, rare. Since humans plan and prepare for norms, not anomalies, such misnomers can feed the notion that climate change isn’t really happening… it’s just another 100-year storm. Such a discontinuity, as futurist Alex Steffen calls this phenomenon, requires people to reconcile an image of the world that was there with the new reality of the world that is.

Once humans began walking upright and making Chevrolets, they could accomplish what only volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and changes in Earth’s orbit have done before: rapidly melt the cryosphere. The cryosphere, a critical and beautifully balanced component of a delicate ecological system, is creaking and groaning and, most importantly, thawing. Levels of carbon in the atmosphere from human activity are so dense that the next ice age, due in some 50,000 years, has been rained out. According to scientists, it won’t begin for at least another 100,000 years hence, and growing.

Climatologists are teasing out the extraordinarily complex systems and conditions that have obtained over the millennia. Measuring gas levels, air currents, saline conditions, flora and fauna, volcanic conditions, temperatures, meteor strikes, and more. They are doing this in order to understand how the climate is influenced by environmental factors, and to use that information to address how we can best manage the climate of today – and the even more dynamic one perhaps still to come. But wait, some of these conditions happened thousands, even hundreds of millions, of years ago. How are they getting their data? CSI: Climate Sleuths Investigate.

Noah, apocryphally tasked with saving the world’s fauna, received some highly detailed instructions about how to do it. Today, more than a million plant and animal species are slated for extinction and we’re scrambling to understand how to preserve them. Seed banks, zoos and aquaria, breeding programs, and in vitro embryos are some of the tools in use to keep as many of those creatures viable as possible. Whether or not those are enough remains to be seen.

Before looking forward, let’s recap the things on our front burners in 2021. The intensity of global sustainability efforts has placed its lack of useful professional tools into stark relief. Companies, already struggling with capacity, deserve a complete set of timesaving, flexible, interactive tools. Valutus added several such arrows to our quiver over the last year, designed to cut weeks or months of difficult work from tasks like performing materiality analyses, setting carbon targets, determining how to make commitments more credible, and aligning a corporation’s promises with its purpose and performance. We also enhanced the ability to quantify customer preference for sustainable products and companies using Customer Science™, and put hard dollar values on that preference via the InVEST™ model. And we crafted the most useful and up-to-date way to stay on top of what stakeholders expect (Stakeholder Science™), what issues are accelerating toward us (VIEWS™ and E3Evolution™), and how seeing over the horizon can help craft more robust scenarios and strategies (Scenario Science™). Plus, we revisited and updated our analysis of emerging risks and coined the term “Total Carbon Ownership” for the increasing tendency of regulators, customers, and the legal system to hold organizations accountable for their contributions to the climate crisis. (For more on what Valutus has been up to, and our tools and programs designed to create a surge in capacity, tease out sustainability’s low-hanging R.O.I., and dramatically increase speed on all the above, you can read more here)

Fictional thieves went after Canada’s strategic maple syrup reserve in 2005 and, ten years later, real syrup desperados made off with a substantial chunk of it. In 2021, however, it was climate change that stole the sweet stuff. Climate ramifications meant a drop in production and half the reserves were emptied to cover the shortfall. The historical range and output of the sugar maple – from Tennessee to central Québec – is now at risk, as are flapjacks everywhere. There is, or may be, still time to keep this condiment in its proper latitudes but determining where the sap runs depends on us.